Big travel sites hit by Google content farming clearout

A string of well known travel brands – including Uptake and Travelpod – have fallen foul of a crackdown by Google on what it calls “low-quality sites” or “sites that are just not very useful”.

A string of well known travel brands – including Uptake and Travelpod – have fallen foul of a crackdown by Google on what it calls “low-quality sites” or “sites that are just not very useful”.

The search giant announced – in a widely expected blog post – last week thatad it was making “big algorithmic improvements” to its ranking system, effectively punishing sites known unfavourably by many ascontent farms – in other words: those lacking a whole lot of original material.

Google says it wants to provide better rankings for “high quality sites – sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on”.

Sensibly, Google has steered clear of naming and shaming sites it expected to be hit by such a change in its search algorithm (only in the US so far) – leaving it to the system to calculate and others to work it out.

Search company Sistrix worked on one million keywords before and after the update, ranking them by a search visibility index covering the number of keyword positions lost.